Two Eggs And A Cocktail Sausage

Most Saturday mornings we all drive into town. Badger and I are bundled into the car, where we sit on a towel on the dashboard. We have to sit on a towel because with my male staff's erratic driving we're likely to slide off into my female staff's handbag and never be seen again. We'd be doomed to forever wander it's dark, dank, dripping depths searching for a way out among the used tissues, keys, cell phones, lipstick, address books, purses, loose change, old parking tickets, packets of headache tablets. (I've never understood why humans eat headache tablets. The last thing I'd want is a headache.) Badger once ate some of my female staff's lipstick. I think he mistook it for a carrot. By the time he'd finished he looked like a skunk in drag. The worst thing about finding oneself lost within my female staff's handbag is that there is very little to eat. (Apart from lipstick obviously.) Last time I was in there I got so desperate that I ate half of her drivers licence and that made me very unpopular. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure whether it was that or the fact that I peed on her cell phone that upset her most.

My female staff's handbag. Seriously, don't ever get lost in it. And if you do, don't pee on her cell phone.

Anyway, today we sat on the towel on the dashboard, so all was well, except that we had a nerve jangling view through the windscreen as my male staff drove us into town at a speed that Lewis Hamilton would not have been ashamed of. Once he gets the scent of coffee in his cavernous, fur filled nostrils he's unstoppable.
Zooming past the town's sports field we saw that it was covered with red and yellow domes, dozens and dozens of them. It was like looking at the face of a huge green teenager with a really bad dose of acne. You might think that a strange analogy, but I rather like it. My female staff said they were tents. Moments later we screeched to a halt in front of my staff's favourite coffee shop. My male staff likes to stop the car by gently running into the back of other vehicles. He says it saves wear and tear on the brakes. On this occasion the owner of the nice gold Aston Martin Lagonda was nowhere to be seen, so there were no threats or fisticuffs which is a shame. Anyway there was only a little bit of yellow paint from my staff's Hyundai Getz on the rear bumper and only a small scratch, certainly nothing to get upset about.

Badger and I were plucked from our towel and carried towards the coffee shop, but halfway across the road  
they stopped abruptly with a hissed exclamation of what sounded like "Holy ship!" Naturally Badger and I looked up and down the street in search of some sort of religious vessel. Seeing only a queue of cars waiting for my staff to get out of the middle of the road we looked instead at the coffee shop. It was awash with lycra. There wasn't a single free table. Every seat was occupied by ancient cyclists - mamils and mawils as my staff like to call them. (Middle Aged Men In Lycra and Middle Aged Women in Lycra.) Some of them were even venerable enough to qualify as ofils and owils. (Old Farts In Lycra and Old Women In Lycra.) Other mamils, mawils, ofils and owils were milling around outside the coffee shop fiddling with their bikes or stretching their ancient limbs. My male staff said that if he ever became Prime Minister (God help us!) he'd make it a capital offence for anyone over the age of forty to wear a lycra cycling outfit in public. Anyway it seems that hundreds of these cyclists had ridden from the town of Kilcoy, over the range to our little town, and were camping for the night on the sports field before cycling on in the morning to Noosa, presumably to invade someone else's favourite coffee shop.

There's only one thing worse than a lycra cycling outfit.

Badger whispered to me that he thought the journey must have been too long for some of them and that there couldn't have been enough toilets along the route because most of the cyclists seemed to have had accidents of the brown and smelly kind. The backs of their lycra pants appeared to be full of lumpy stuff. We assumed it was bush chocolate. Even guinea pigs know that older humans can have those sort of issues. They even walked as though their pants were full of something warm and squishy. My female staff assured us that it wasn't the case, and that the lumpy stuff in their pants was padding. Badger looked at her doubtfully and told me that he thought most of them had enough natural padding, especially around the stomach. Many of the male cyclists had obviously brought their own lunch with them, though why they'd had to shove it down the front of their lycra pants I'm not sure. The funny thing about male cyclists is that they all seem to have the same thing for lunch - a cocktail sausage and a couple of hard boiled eggs. As for the female lycra clad cyclists, it looked as though they were competing in a camel-toe contest. In any case it was enough to put my staff off their coffee, which was just as well since the coffee shop was full to bursting point anyway.

Veteran cyclist Lance Arsetrong was disqualified from the Kilcoy to Noosa bike ride for using a performing enhancing substance.

In no time flat my staff had us back in the Hyundi Getz. We reversed into a shiny new Lexus and shot off up the road towards home for a cup of instant coffee and a stale biscuit. After which they stomped about the house in a foul mood until it was time for wine and cheese on the deck at sunset. Ah. Happy days.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
When I ate the lipstick I also got it all over my toenails which Billy found most attractive - unfortunately. I had to spend most of the rest of the day with my butt firmly jammed into the corner of my cage.